She smiles through everything-the family portrait, the tedious speeches, the snapshots with happy friends, the hugs and goodbyes. She smiles and smiles and smiles until finally we are in the car on the way home and then she weeps. She weeps like a little girl.

FOUR.

SUMMER 2004.

Shortly after Emmy's graduation, I am driving down a busy street in Charlotte when my station wagon, my quintessential "mom" car, makes an awful grinding sound and then shudders to a halt. It only takes a couple of hours for the tow truck to arrive and take me and the Blue Monster, so named by one of Emmy's friends, to the transmission shop, where the experts are baffled.

This is not a happy time for me. My collection of short stories came out recently, and while the reviews were generally favorable, several said the stories were "depressing." But mostly I am worried about my mother.

Then comes the call. Sandy, my mother's landlord, tells me that my mother is in the hospital for something unspecified. I call the hospital and speak to Mom.

"Do you need me to come get you?" I ask.

"No, it's too much of a bother," she says. Then she begins to cry.

My car is in the shop, so I find a ride to a car rental place, rent a little white economy car, and drive the five hours to Edenton. When I walk into the hospital room, I find my mother lying in the bed looking like a bewildered child. For a moment it is as if we are strangers.

A nurse comes in, smiles, and busies herself taking my mother's stats. I stare out the window at the flat silver lake on the other side of the parking lot and wonder what's coming next.

The doctors can't find anything seriously wrong with my mother. She's dehydrated, they say, so they pump her full of fluids and the next day she's ready to go home. Before she's released I go over to the church and meet with several of her choir members, hoping to find some way that she can stay in Edenton. They knit their brows. They're concerned, but they aren't her family. I can't expect anyone to take her in and care for her.

"Mom, I think you should come home with me. I've found an a.s.sisted-living place near my house," I tell her.

"No, no. We can't afford it," she says.

So I leave her with a makeshift care arrangement and drive home feeling as if I have abandoned her on an ice floe.

When I get home, my car is supposedly fixed. I have my summer arts camp job, and for two weeks I forget about my problems as I revel in poetry and playwriting with my brilliant teenage prodigies.

But the car is not fixed, and neither is my mother. Mom is back in the hospital. This time I decide I will not leave without her.

Hank and Emmy are not thrilled. My mother's plaintive cry "Pat!" rings through our house. She needs help getting to the bathroom. She can't get out of the chair. She forgets which door is the closet and which is the bathroom. She throws our busy lives into slow motion. They don't understand. They can't see who she really is. They can't see past the illusion of the body, sheathed in papery skin. I know that in reality, in my reality, she is an exciting, funloving person with a terrific sense of humor. They, however, see someone who cries and is no fun at all. To them she's like the worrywart fish in The Cat and the Hat.

One night we decide to watch one of Hank's favorite movies, Shrek. I think Hank secretly identifies with the large green ogre, a softhearted grouch. It is not an unreasonable comparison.

We love watching movies together, and we mistakenly a.s.sume that my mother will enjoy this family ritual of ours: the popcorn, the pillows piled in front of the TV, the dog nosing his way into the circle. We place Mom in her portable recliner and turn the television up loud enough for her to hear it, and we proceed to enjoy the movie, Hank chuckling at the witty banter between Shrek and Donkey. But we are not even halfway through when my mother grows frantic. She frets and moans and says, "Oh, this is terrible. This is terrible."

Hank and I look at each other. My lips tighten over my teeth. Emmy is silent.

"What is it, Mom?" I ask. "What's wrong?"

But she can't tell me what's wrong. She can only moan and flail about. Hank and Emmy disperse. I turn off the movie. The night is ruined. (In fact, we never watch that movie again.) My mother doesn't seem to notice. All she knows is that now my attention has turned to her, and there are no distractions.

With my helpless mother in the house, I sigh constantly. I have never before understood the emotional significance of the sigh. But now I get it. A sigh is your very spirit crying its quiet distress. A sigh is your futile prayer to whatever G.o.ds might overhear it. You understand you are beyond help. There is no answer. So you sigh.

Then my brother David shows up. David is the hero in any narrative. He's the one who goes into a poverty-ridden school where the children are looking forward to a life of gang violence and prison and teaches them to play chess and takes them to the White House and shows them the world and the children grow up and get scholarships to Ivy League schools, and if perchance they still get in trouble, he goes to court and convinces the judge to give them another chance. He's the one who came to find me when I was holed up with another junkie in the Battery and took me back to the drug program in the 1970s. He's the one who will chase down a purse s.n.a.t.c.her for twenty blocks until finally the perpetrator throws the purse down in frustration and keeps going.

I wrap my arms around him in relief.

David and I take a tour of an a.s.sisted-living place near my house. He agrees that it's a decent enough place. The price is somewhat daunting, but right now Mother has enough savings that we can get her in there and pay for a few months. And at this point we're not able to look much further than that. Perhaps it's a failure of imagination, or that annoying habit I have (as Hank loves to point out) of believing that everything will just work out. "G.o.d will take care of it," Hank says in a mincing voice even though I've never said that (out loud).

Even as he's nearing sixty, David still bears a strong resemblance to the muscular weight lifter he was in high school. He has a newscaster's deep voice and he brings a Spockian logic to problems. After we look at the a.s.sisted-living place, we take Mother to an outdoor cafe near my house. David and I discuss her options: Should Mom go into the a.s.sisted-living facility? Should we try a little harder to find someone to stay with her in Edenton?

Mom then puts her hand out and says, "But where will I be sleeping tonight?"

"You'll be at my house, Mom, with us. Just like you have been all week," I tell her. I don't cry. I don't bang my head on the metal table. I don't rip open my blouse and beat my chest. But I want to.

Later these lapses won't bother me so much. Occasionally, I'll snap at my mother when she says something absurd. Other times I'll just answer the question and move on. Everyone who has had a parent lose his or her mind knows the shock of the first time. Every single one of us thought it would never happen to our parents. Sure, old people in the movies or on TV are ditzy as h.e.l.l, but not our parents. Then it happens right in front of us. And if it happened to those G.o.ds of our childhood, we can no longer deny it will happen to us. Lord, let me die first becomes our unspoken prayer.

Emmy is not happy. To her, my mother is a rival. And sometimes I think my mother feels the same way about her. My mother never took to grandmotherhood the way some people do. Don't get me wrong-my mother thinks Emmy is lovely. But she doesn't feel the same way that Hank's parents seem to feel about grandchildren-something to dote on and brag about.

My mother is not convinced by our arguments that a.s.sisted living is the way to go. She does not want to leave her job, and who can blame her? She wants to go back to her piano, her choir, her pipe organ at the church. She will struggle up the narrow steps every Sunday to the balcony of the church where she will lift her hands and make music happen.

My brother shrugs his shoulders. This is what she wants.

"But it won't work," I tell him.

"We have to let her try," he says.

So I pack mother's toilet seat into the trunk and her walker into the backseat of the rental car that David is using to take her home. Hank and Emmy come out onto the porch. They are both way more cheerful than I am. I hug David goodbye and then hold my mother. Nothing about this feels right. I am helpless to do anything about it. She's as happy to be going home as Hank and Emmy are to see her go.

So my mother leaves and I turn my attention to getting Emmy ready for her new school. She is going into the lion's den alone. She will need fashionable clothing, not just the hand-me-downs from the neighborhood teenager who happens to be her size and a couple of years older. It's been a lean summer for me, and Hank with his usual largesse spots her the customary C-note to go shopping for school clothes. Well, I decide, she'll have to figure out a way to impress the kids with something other than her sartorial savoir faire.

"I'm not worried," she says with a weak smile. The kid is scared s.h.i.tless. Me, too. And this year I have no one to carpool with. No one else at the school lives in the hinterlands where we live. That means that for the next two and a half years I'll be driving a half hour there and back every single morning during rush hour and twenty minutes there and back every afternoon. That's almost two hours a day in a car. And of course I'll be calling on my fiction writing skills fairly regularly as I make up excuses for why we're late almost every day.

FIVE.

AUGUST 2004.

The third time my mother goes into the hospital that summer is, I decide, the last time. No more consulting with brothers. No more trying to patch together a system of care for her. She is eighty-six years old. She is crippled. Her mind is faltering. Her independent life is over.

I feel as if my chest has caved in. I walk around carrying a tray of pain as if it were hors d'oeuvres. No one wants any. A friend asks me why I don't just give myself permission to own the pain. "Go ahead and grieve," she says. I put that on my "to do" list. But first I have to go and take her away from her old life for good. On top of it all, another hurricane is heading for the North Carolina coast where she lives.

On Monday August 1, 2004, I'm back at the rental car place because, once again, the Blue Monster is in the shop. I'm now on a first-name basis with the manager. He gives me a compact, and I drive to Edenton with a purpose. I am getting her and taking her and as many of her things as I can fit in this little car. I am commandeering her life. In Edenton, they will have parties for her. They will celebrate her. They will make a cake in the shape of a piano. They will print a huge story in the local paper about this gifted woman who came to a small historic village and played the organ for their church services, created a community chorus, wrote music for them, and taught them to sing like angels. For her it will be like getting to attend her own funeral. It will be sad, but it will not be depressing. She will be the belle of the ball.

While a light steady rain falls, I pack and load, pack and load. She does what I tell her to do like an obedient little girl. When I've finished cramming everything I can get inside the car, she lowers herself into the front seat. I fold up her walker and jam it in the backseat on top of the boxes of books and kitchen items and music ma.n.u.scripts. I lean over and help her buckle her seat belt. Then I shut the door and run around to the driver's side. Clouds hunker over the Sound. Hurricane Alex is brewing off the coast, and we are leaving it and Edenton behind. The roads are slick. I back into the busy street, put the car in drive, and go. My mother's Edenton life disappears in the mist.

Later that day my mother is sitting on the bed of her new "home"-a second-floor room in an a.s.sisted-living place called the Oaks. We both suddenly feel sick. I am positive that this is the wrong thing. This has been an awful mistake. My mother smiles stiffly, trying to be brave.

"The carpet is pretty," she says. But we both hate the place and everything about it. And mostly I hate myself. Should I have moved her in with me, I wonder? But how would I ever get any work done? Would Hank and Emmy leave me if I did? And where would we put the piano? The management here has promised that we can keep the piano in the parlor. Of course it's not the best idea, leaving a Steinway grand out where any senile person could spill Ensure all over the keys, but at least Mom can entertain people, which is what she lives for.

The main reason my mother cannot live in our house with us is that we are not always there. And this is the one thing I know she needs: the company of others, not just her moody daughter and her daughter's equally moody family. She needs friends, admirers, and co-conspirators. In a little cabinet in my heart where I keep the things that hurt me most is the memory of her telling me that, in her apartment in Edenton, she screamed sometimes at the top of her lungs just to see if anyone would hear her, to see if anyone would come. My mother has friends in Edenton, but her best friend Marion has just been moved to an a.s.sisted-living place in Long Island to be near her daughter. And her other friends have lives of their own. And a few (to my continued wonder) seem to have abandoned her altogether.

So I stifle the anguish roiling in my chest.

"I'll come play Scrabble with you every day," I promise. "I'll take you out places. I won't leave you here all the time."

She clutches me. I am her lifeline as she was once mine. We will do this together.

"The Alice in Wonderland was mine as a child," I explain to my brothers. "It was a gift from someone."

They concede the book. We are sitting on the floor of the living room of our mother's apartment in Edenton, divvying up her stuff. We don't have many conflicts except a few minor skirmishes over the books.

"Oh, here's the Boston School of Cooking," Jo says, gently opening the old relic as if it were the original Dead Sea Scrolls. I wouldn't mind having that, but Jo is the cook.

All three of us want the Kierkegaard. I'm sure David already has a copy. He takes the Bertrand Russell instead since it was his to begin with. I don't know why I think I'm going to have some profound metamorphosis and wake up one morning as an intellectual. Jo gets the Kierkegaard.

I always thought it was a bad idea for Mom not to a.s.sign things to each of us, but the division turns out to be fairly easy. We each wind up with the things that mean the most to us or that we need. Jo lays claim to the old table from the days of Lincoln, but he has no room for it so I'll keep it at my house. I have already sequestered the bird-of-paradise plates and that makes up for anything else that I might desire but which they might desire more. In fact, I don't want much when it comes to Mom's things. Stuff feels rather burdensome to me. David takes the beautiful old crystal wine gla.s.ses. Jo and I don't drink so that only seems fair. He takes lamps for his New York apartment. Fortunately, the pictures will go to her new place-otherwise there would surely be strong disagreement over who should get the wheelbarrow painting that Andy Griffith gave her. They met when she was the music director at The Lost Colony, and his wife even sang in a performance of her requiem. When she admired the picture hanging on his wall, he sent it over to her house the next day.

I take George and Martha, the porcelain figurines that once belonged to Gammie, Skipper's mother, and that my mother somehow played with as a child. It's possible that George and Martha are worth some money, but we'll never know. I would have to be starving before I'd sell them.

We're too engrossed in the dismantling of our mother's Edenton existence to absorb the finality of it. The moment one of us begins to feel it, we close our mouths, lips tight together. Almost everyone at some point, I suppose, realizes they must face a time like this. We know that our parents cannot go on doing whatever it is they do forever. Change must come. We see it happening to the parents of our friends. The inevitable. But when that particular experience comes your way, it is more wrenching than you felt possible. My mother will never again live on her own, I realize, as I empty the kitchen drawers of her old silverware. She will not play the organ every Sunday as she has for most of the past seventy years. She will not put together shows. She will no longer shelter a choir in her living room on Wednesday nights.

"Her first organ-playing job was at the age of fourteen or maybe thirteen," I say out loud as I stack piles of music into boxes. But my brothers know this. As I'm packing away her music, I find about ten or so copies of An American Requiem in old tattered black folders. Something tells me to keep these scores. Someday maybe we'll get enough money to hire someone to put the requiem in computer format and submit it to a publisher. I'm pretty sure this is the one thing I need to hang onto.

In spite of what we are doing, the fact that my brothers and I are together is a rare and happy enough event that it keeps us from becoming morose. Besides, we are packing and cleaning machines now. The ants abandoning the ant farm after the queen is gone.

We've advertised a yard sale for the next day, and Sandy has offered to help. We're hoping that the furniture will sell. It's going cheap. A few of Mother's acquaintances drop by on Friday while we're in the midst of packing and deciding what to sell, what to keep, what to give away. I mistakenly think they're visiting with us, but really they're nosing around our mother's belongings early, trying to stake their claims. David is irritated with them, but we go ahead and get rid of a few things. One woman wants to buy the little books of Shakespeare plays that are probably a century old. I've lived my whole life knowing those little books were always available if I needed them (although I'd long ago absconded with her tattered copy of The Collected Works). Once, I actually performed a reading of the entirety of Romeo and Juliet for my mother, using one of those little books. And she, saintly woman, sat on the living-room couch (this same couch now in need of a new home) and served as my audience. I have no idea if the books are worth anything, but I'm so tired of packing and the truck I've rented hasn't even an inch of s.p.a.ce left. So I sadly, regretfully, let them go for a few dollars, knowing I'll never feel good about doing that.

Friday night, we go to the only Italian joint in town. We talk politics and though we are all on the same side, for a moment it gets heated between my two brothers.

"Bush is an idiot," David says.

"Bush is not an idiot," Jo says angrily. I don't get it. Jo is definitely no Republican.

"He is, too!" David says and his generally deep voice cracks in righteous indignation.

I have a feeling their anger has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with why we are here, or maybe it's just an eruption from some long-ago childhood battle that happened before I was born. The argument subsides, and we move back into that place where we know and understand each other better than anyone else ever can. I idolized my big brothers when I was a child, and I still hold them in high regard though now I can acknowledge their imperfections, too. And they seem to love me as if I were still the long-haired, laughing little girl they tossed back and forth between them as brawny teenage boys.

We have been with each other through a lifetime of mistakes, miracles, and accolades. We are each other's biggest fans. When I was in prison, I would call David almost every week for my allotted phone call. He told me later that someone, who was supposedly an expert on f.u.c.ked-up people such as myself, had told him to cut me off. "Once a junkie, always . . ." this genius told him. And what did my brother know? He had never been a drug addict. But he was always there when I called, willing to talk to me, willing to laugh or be horrified by my observations of prison life, whichever was appropriate.

"You wouldn't believe how many thieves there are in this place," I once told him without a trace of irony, and he burst out laughing. He also made sure I got the Sunday New York Times every week, which was one of the things that probably saved me. It gave me a connection to a world that I could aspire to, a world of educated banter and beautiful clothes, far away from the raucous, simple-minded bullying and poorly made prison uniforms that const.i.tuted my life at the time.

For some reason I was not in regular communication with my other brother, Jo, during those years. He was dealing with issues of his own-a divorce, illness, and too much time spent on a barstool before he found AA. But years later when I'd gotten into an unfortunate relationship, he was the one to drive twelve hours to where I lived and handle the hostilities. Whenever he visited, which became fairly frequent in recent years, we would meditate together, I would listen to his poems, and he would read my stories.

My brothers and I have always been united by love and admiration for our mother and bitterness toward our father. Our father is living in Jacksonville Beach, beset by dementia. We rarely see him.

The next morning, the vultures arrive. We have one absolutely beautiful vase for which I am asking fifteen dollars. It's probably worth seventy-five. Some white-haired crone tries to bargain me down on the price. But I am tired of haggling, and I refuse. I'll keep the d.a.m.n thing first. Behind my back she convinces Sandy to let her have it for five dollars. When I realize what has happened, I want to s.n.a.t.c.h it out of her hands and smash it to little porcelain bits on the sidewalk. That's how I feel at the end of the day of bargaining away my mother's life.

When the apartment is emptied, we scrub and mop every inch of the place, and then we drive away. Jo takes off in his loaded van with Ralph Nader stickers on the b.u.mper. David takes off in Mother's old Buick, loaded with boxes and lamps. And I drive away in the filled-to-the-brim rental truck. Even the cab is filled with her belongings. How I am going to unload that truck by myself I have no idea. When I get back to Charlotte, I dragoon Emmy into helping me. Hank will have no part of it.

I spend the next day unloading. Emmy and I somehow get Mother's small but very heavy Clavinova onto a hand truck, through the delivery entrance, and into Mother's new room. I hang up the pictures and try to make it look like "home," but my mother is not home and she knows it. Then we swallow back our tears and play a game of Scrabble.

I'm not placing bets on her lasting much longer. How can she survive without that busy admiring world of hers? The change is cataclysmic.

THREE.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME.

Remember thy servant, O Lord.

He was not ready to leave us,

Nor were we ready to see him go.

The dark scissors of death have separated us.

He accepted danger. Its strong and shining thread

Led him from this tangled maze.

Help us, Lord, in thy great wisdom.